After letting a White House win slip through their fingers in 2012, Republicans made a commitment: It was time to broaden the conservative tent, to bring in the minority voters and the younger voters who have often felt alienated by hard-line social stances.

The past week showed that following through is a work in progress.

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As debate raged about the Confederate flag boldly flying in front of South Carolina’s Capitol building, even as the nation reeled from the vicious gunning down of nine black parishioners at the hands of a white supremacist fond of posing with the rebel flag, the Republican candidates consistently failed to strongly come out against the divisive symbol.

They struggled, again and again, to follow through on the basic tenet of the post-2012, post-Mitt-Romney-face-flop autopsy — stop pissing off minorities in America.

Notably, it was Romney who cast the harshest light on the candidates’ unwillingness to take a stand over the weekend, stating, in no uncertain terms, that it was time to take that flag down.

Republican strategists, however, are defending the wobbles and hedges as awkward but probably necessary for a crowded field of candidates afraid to botch their chances in South Carolina, the first-in-the-South primary state.

“It’s been no profile in courage, but they all realize you’ve got to win the nomination first,” said David Mowery, an Alabama-based strategist. “Sometimes in the modern 24-hour-a-day news cycle, it’s better to take a step back rather than stepping out onto a limb and then have the limb get hacked off.”

The conversation about the rebel flag — long honored by Southern conservatives as a symbol of historic pride and long derided by others as a symbol of racism and hatred — gained unexpected momentum at the end of last week.

As happens, the campaign season magnified the debate by many multitudes, and the Republican contenders stuck with a holding line that it was an issue for South Carolina to decide.

Even those like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who’s characterized his overall strategy as being willing to “lose the primary in order to win the general election,” showed a reluctance to truly test that proposition.

Instead, he reminded voters that he opted to remove the same flag from Florida’s statehouse when he was governor and expressed confidence that South Carolina “will do the right thing,” but stopped just short of saying what that might be.

The GOP hopefuls were happy to take a wait-and-see approach until South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was ready to make her announcement Monday afternoon that she wanted the flag down.

“Don’t ever underestimate the defiant streak that runs through all the Southern states,” Mowery said. “This could very quickly have become less about the flag and all about ‘Don’t tell me what to do’; and with 13 states that still sanction the flag in some way, this could be an issue that, if misplayed, follows a candidate through all of these states. With so many of them voting early [in the nomination process] this time, that would be a huge problem.”

As soon as Haley and local leaders called for the flag’s removal Monday afternoon, Bush tweeted praise and his belief that her decision was “the right thing to do.”

Bush was by no means alone in that script. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who hedged on the question of the flag over the weekend, was eager to let people know he’d truly supported its removal the whole time; after Haley’s announcement Monday, people who requested to be identified as “Walker sources” offered up a quote stating: “The governor was there this weekend but after speaking with South Carolina leaders, he decided to respect their wishes to focus on the victims and their families before weighing in.”

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has highlighted his outreach to African-American communities and tried to portray himself as a candidate who can broaden the Republican coalition, was silent on the matter for days. When he finally weighed in — on Tuesday — he gave no indication that he’d been conflicted.

“I think the flag is inescapably a symbol of human bondage and slavery,” Paul said. “I think that that symbolism needs to end, and I think South Carolina is doing the right thing.”

And then there’s Sen. Ted Cruz.

The Texas Republican has been relatively quiet on this issue, saying in an interview before Haley’s call for the flag to came down that he understands the “passions that this debate evokes on both sides,” but would leave the decision to the people of South Carolina.

But at least one member of his leadership team in South Carolina is stirring up trouble, and serves as a stark example of the party’s struggle to stay on the inclusiveness message.

State Sen. Lee Bright, Cruz’s South Carolina co-chair, has emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the move. Bright told the Charleston Post and Courier that taking the flag down was akin to a “Stalinist purge,” a claim he expanded on in an interview with POLITICO on Tuesday.

“It’s not just the flag,” Bright said. “They want to take down the Confederate monuments; I’ve gotten emails from people who want to rename streets. … Anytime you want to basically remove the symbols of history from a state, that’s something that just is very bad. … These are honorable men who fought for their homes, their home state; to disgrace them in the name of political correctness is just wrong. They’re not here to defend themselves.”

Asked whether the senator, who called slavery the “original sin of our nation,” agreed with his South Carolina co-chair’s assessment, Cruz’s campaign simply referred back to the candidate’s prior statements on the matter. Another Cruz co-chair, state Rep. Bill Chumley, also opposes the removal of the flag.

“I would encourage presidential candidates to let us deal with this,” Bright said, noting that the Cruz campaign had not reached out to him on this issue. “It’s deeply rooted history for a lot of us. I’m not going to stand by and let our ancestors’ memories be besmirched. It’s one thing to just take down the flag. They want us to concede that the soldiers that fell for the Confederacy were a bunch of racists, and I’m not going to concede that.”